Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Fuller and Baroness Boycott

Committee stage
Thursday 4th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, it is a delight to follow the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, on his amendment. I entirely agree with everything he says. Not that long ago, a lido not far from where my daughter lives in east London was ripped down and turned into, of all things, a car park, which seems an ultimately depressing sanction on today. I can tell him right now that, if he chooses to divide the House on that subject in the future, I will walk behind him through the Lobby. I thank him.

On my Amendments 100, 101 and 102, I am very grateful to be supported by the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, on all three and by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, on Amendment 100. They are in addition to Clause 50, and they are about training to do with climate change, biodiversity and ecological surveying. This does not just hold up planning distinctions—it is a question not just of newts, bats and different kinds of badgers but of people not knowing what they are talking about. Therefore, a lot of decisions are not only delayed but end up going to appeal.

My Amendment 100 would mean that the training would be mandatory in the overall planning that is to be provided in general under Clause 50. Amendment 102 provides that the training must be provided not only to elected members of the planning committees but also to local authority planning officers responsible for making any planning decisions. Amendment 101 includes the highways, with the list of authorities to which the training provisions apply. That is obviously crucial and often gets left out, because roads, after all, cut through animal corridors, divide woods, divide fields and separate areas where nature is trying to talk to itself and be together.

These skills and resourcing gaps with planning authorities have been identified very generally across the board as a key blocker. Indeed, the Government’s own impact assessment for the Bill states:

“There is very limited data on how environmental obligations affect development”,


yet there is clear and mounting evidence, including from the OEP, that ecological capacity and skills within the planning system is a key reason for the environmental assessment not functioning effectively.

The OEP goes on to say that

“without Government commitment to providing those public bodies responsible for assessments with the skills”

and

“expertise … needed … now or in future”,

they

“will not deliver as they should to support positive environmental outcomes”.

It advised that the Government should now develop a strategy for this resourcing and for securing the expertise by the public bodies.

A survey undertaken by the Association of Local Government Ecologists of its planning authorities found that only 53% of survey respondents said that their LPA has limited access to an ecologist for planning work, and only 5% of respondents said that their system is adequate. Any noble Lord who was in the House on Monday listening to the Science Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Vallance of Balham, answer a question about AI and training would have found it interesting to hear him say that a report from MIT last week on the use of AI across companies

“noted that 95% of companies got very little benefit and 5% got massively disproportionate benefit”.—[Official Report, 1/9/25; col. 511.]

The reason was that they had been properly trained. Whether we are talking about training to build sports grounds or training to protect wildlife, the training is needed.

The excellent charity Plantlife has highlighted that these gaps are even more acute for, say, botany and mycology. Botany was once compulsory, I guess, when most of us took GCSE biology. I certainly did it, and I did at A-level too. Research shows, however, that it is now practically non-existent. That is why, again, it is crucial that the amendment includes botanical and mycological survey.

Much has been made here of the cost. The noble Lord, Lord Thurlow, mentioned this as well, but I always feel that I am trying to plead amendments that put more and more emphasis on local authorities doing more and more. I expect that many Members remember the extraordinary Dasgupta report that came out from the Treasury under the Tory Government and looked at the costs of nature. I had the privilege of spending much of last night interviewing Professor Dasgupta. We were talking about many specific things, one of which was that the real way to rebuild our shattered biodiversity and our ecological strength is, generally, through a community, but there is a very strong financial aspect here. Our GDP, at the moment, is an incentive to depreciate all natural assets. The system for measuring the state of public finances discourages all investment in maintaining the UK’s stock of natural capital. Shockingly, the Bank of England mandates do not recognise that value.

It would make a lot of sense for the Government to revisit some of these local-looking economics and say, “Yes, we can afford to train people properly; in fact, we can’t afford not to train them properly”. Well-trained councillors and well-trained planning leaders will also add to people’s enjoyment and, as with building sports facilities, the joy they take in nature, being out in the countryside and thinking it is something in which they have a vested interest to protect. Unless we all start doing that, we will all be poorer, regardless of what we do.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 103, which was tabled in July but has risen to the top only today. The aim of this amendment is really simple, although I must congratulate the Public Bill Office for also making it comprehensive. “Comprehensive” is the appropriate word here, in the week when so many people have gone back to school after the summer holidays. If this amendment is accepted, quite a few people in government might find themselves returning to their alma maters. This amendment would go beyond the provisions that the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, has just outlined, because it would include Ministers and officials.

The Minister and I both go back some way in local government. While we might have trodden different paths in the sense that we approached things through two different political lenses, we have progressed by making evidence-based decisions grounded in policy with an intellectual honesty that would increase the well-being of those we served. I want to make the distinction between the different sorts of decisions that we take in local government. Some are political, some are part of an executive function and sometimes we make decisions within the scrutiny function. When it comes to planning or licensing, however, we make quasi-judicial decisions. These are the decisions that carry the weight of law and, when you make them, you need to be clear that you are acting within the law.

Great British Energy Bill

Debate between Lord Fuller and Baroness Boycott

Report stage
Tuesday 11th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to my Amendment 53, which seeks to ensure that the voices of local people are heard when proposals are made or encouraged by GB Energy for renewable energy projects that impact on local areas. This is a group about community involvement and consultation, and how people might have their say. I regret to say that, in so many cases, local people have been airbrushed from the debate, which has been conducted above their heads. We build resentment, scepticism and resistance when local people are denied their say. I speak with authority when I say that the NSIP system is being systematically abused by developers of solar farms, who string together otherwise stand-alone and discrete proposals for small-scale solar and aggregate them together as a device to somehow creep over the threshold. The voices of the local planning authority, locally elected representatives, local people and business are excised from the record.

The NSIP system was designed to allow truly exceptional and impactful infrastructure projects to be considered in the national context. I completely support that principle, but I see in my own area, for example, that one proposal, extending to 1,100 hectares but covering 40 square kilometres and at least a dozen separate landowners some 15 miles apart, has been cobbled together in the crudest and most cynical manner to creep over that 100-megawatt capacity line. It undermines public confidence in our planning system and acts as a recruiting sergeant for conspiracy theorists and their superficial, fundamentalist views. We will all become tainted and tarred by their brush while we deny the public due process and a proper say on these schemes, which should be decided locally but are not.

Later, on Amendments 50 and 52, I will say that solar should not be permitted on the best and most versatile land—grades 1 to 3A. I recognise that other land could be used for large-scale renewables, but we need to exercise care and caution. Even grade 4 or grade 5 land has a value, but that is more likely to include amenity value, outstanding landscape contribution or wider social benefit, perhaps in areas of outstanding natural beauty or other designations. It is for that reason that, for all land—even in cases where land may be at the poorer end of agricultural quality—changes in use to renewables more widely should be consulted on for residents within a 20-mile buffer of the widest proposed land extent. My amendment provides for this stipulation.

It is because the NSIP system is being abused and has fallen into disrepute that I have brought this amendment to repair the damage and indignation that local people rightly feel. We are storing up some terrible problems if the political class structurally sidelines views in an unthinking dash for renewables and fails to consider those wider impacts.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I rise briefly too to speak to my Amendment 22. I am very grateful for all the support of so many noble Lords, and I am thrilled to be standing here after so many attempts to get community energy into the statute books. I note the work of Power for People, which has done a fantastic job over the years to make this happen.

Following on from the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, my sister has lived in Denmark for over 50 years now and she has had a financial stake in a wind farm for a very long time. She gets good, reliable, cheap energy. They really like it; it makes you feel like part of something.

I do not support the Liberal Democrats’ amendment that GB Energy should have to pay for all the home insulation, but I am extremely worried about where this money is going to come from. I do not see a place. We all understand that we have to do something about homes, for all the many reasons that the noble Earl, Lord Russell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, set out, yet there seems to be a bit of a black hole, as we call it, in this department. You cannot get everything out of the GB Energy fund, and it is right that it should be ring-fenced around the actual production of the new green fuels that we all need, but there needs to be a be a really tough plan. I would be very interested to know what the Government have in store.